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By Root 2056 0

Keitel Kalfsson, and many men from Western Settlement. An old man named Sokki Thorisson offered to mediate between Simon and Einar. As compensation for having murdered Ozur, Einar offered some articles including an ancient suit of armor, which Simon rejected as rubbish. Kolbein slipped around behind Einar and hit him between the shoulders with his axe, just at the moment when Einar was bringing down his own axe on Simon’s head. As both Simon and Einar fell dying, Einar commented, “It is only what I expected.” Einar’s foster-brother Thord rushed at Kolbein, who managed to kill him at once by jabbing an axe into his throat.

Einar’s men and Kolbein’s men then started a battle against each other. A man called Steingrim told them all to please stop fighting, but both sides were so mad that they thrust a sword through Steingrim. On Kolbein’s side, Krak, Thorir, and Vighvat ended up dead, as well as Simon. On Einar’s side, Bjorn, Thorarin, Thord, and Thorfinn ended up dead as well as Einar, plus Steingrim counted as a member of Einar’s side. Many men were badly wounded. At a peace meeting organized by a level-headed farmer called Hall, Kolbein’s side was ordered to pay compensation because Einar’s side had lost more men. Even so, Einar’s side was bitterly disappointed in the verdict. Kolbein sailed off to Norway with a polar bear that he gave as a present to King Harald Gilli, still complaining about how cruelly he had been treated. King Harald considered Kolbein’s story a pack of lies and refused to pay a bounty for the polar bear. So Kolbein attacked and wounded the king and sailed off to Denmark but drowned en route. And that is the end of this saga.

Another male skeleton at the same churchyard has a knife blade between the ribs. Two female skeletons from Sandnes cemetery with similar cut wounds of the skull testify that women as well as men could die in feuds. Dating from later years of the Greenland colony, at a time when axes and swords had become vanishingly rare because of scarcity of iron, are skulls of four adult women and one eight-year-old child, each with one or two sharp-edged holes between half an inch and one inch in diameter and evidently made by a crossbow bolt or arrow. Domestic violence is suggested by the skeleton of a 50-year-old woman at Gardar Cathedral with a fractured throat bone called the hyoid; forensic pathologists have learned to interpret a fractured hyoid as evidence that the victim was strangled by a hand choke hold.

Along with that violent streak coexisting uneasily with an emphasis on communal cooperation, the Greenland Norse also carried over from Iceland and Norway a sharply stratified, hierarchically organized social organization, such that a small number of chiefs dominated owners of small farms, tenants who didn’t even own their own farms, and (initially) slaves. Again like Iceland, Greenland politically was not organized as a state but as a loose federation of chiefdoms operating under feudal conditions, with neither money nor a market economy. Within the first century or two of the Greenland colony, slavery disappeared, and the slaves became freedmen. However, the number of independent farmers probably decreased with time as they were forced into becoming tenants of the chiefs, a process that is well documented in Iceland. We don’t have corresponding records for the process in Greenland, but it seems likely there too, because the forces promoting it were even more marked in Greenland than in Iceland. Those forces consisted of climate fluctuations driving poorer farmers in bad years into debt to richer farmers who lent them hay and livestock, and who could eventually foreclose on them. Evidence of those farm hierarchies is still visible today among Greenland farm ruins: compared to poor farms, the best-located farms had a larger area of good pasture, larger cow and sheep barns with stalls for more animals, bigger hay barns, larger houses, larger churches, and smithies. The hierarchies are also visible today as the higher ratios of cow and caribou bones to sheep and seal bones in